Strange Fruit
by thayet9
Summary: Sometimes when he wakes up his bed is stained with blood and red welts make crisscrossed patterns across his back. His scars begin to look like landscapes clustered on top of one another. Sometimes when he gets up too fast he gets dizzy, can't gulp air down his windpipe and he has to remind himself that he is free now. Trigger warning does not shy away from the reality of slavery.


Strange Fruit

Being with England felt like a thick collar around his throat, it had been there so long it was almost comforting like a heavy hand on his shoulder reminding him someone was always there. But then it tightened like a noose, thick cord biting tender flesh and suddenly America couldn't get away fast enough and it was worth the burn of too much friction too fast to tear loose.

America had always believed that when he left England he would be _free_. That all he need do was land a solid kick to jolly old England, send him skipping like a stone back to his island and he would be able to breath but the occasional whisper of something coarse and heavy against his collar makes him wonder.

Sometimes when he wakes up his bed is stained with blood and red welts make crisscrossed patterns across his back. His scars begin to look like landscapes clustered on top of one another. some are raw and oozing and others thick pale lines of poorly healed flesh. The noose is if anything tighter and sometimes when he gets up too fast he gets dizzy, can't gulp air down his windpipe from the crushing and has to remind himself that he is _free_ now.

It only get's worse with time as _they_ become a part of him. He dreams of rich farmland with acres upon acres of cotton clouds growing on bushes. He dreams of bodies hanging like fruit from twisted trees and the stink of rotting flesh. He looks out of his window and he watches a young mother thanking God for bounty, asking for wealth. He watches a young mother as her child is torn from her arms and sold to answer another mother's prayers.

He has never been richer, he enjoys a wealth that makes his most mouthwatering fantasies attainable. America can eat whenever he wants whatever he wants, he can indulge in music and dance. He debates the finer points of culture with anyone who will listen. He learns to wrap his chest and back in bandages and waits for the wounds to appear.

One night he wakes screaming. His skin boils, his flesh turns black and brittle, his throat is eventually so damaged he can no longer scream but he does not die. It lasts ten hours, ten hours of agony. He wants to die he begs for death, he prays for insanity but he is alive and sane for what seems like an eternity and suddenly his breath sears his lungs one last time and then it ends.

Meetings with his boss were always tedious, he'd rather be out taking what the land has to offer then going over tax reforms and the quarterly budget but soon they become torturous.

"Please, this doesn't feel right" He asks for help and no one is listening. When he begs they laugh, when he burns they are standing with torches lit. When he fights they kill their children.. no his children. They are animals, heathens, foreign and strange, they look different, they are uncivilized America repeats over and over to himself but he can't remember who he is referring too but then he recalls that he is talking to himself. He hates himself, he hates the part of himself that fights back and the part that is fought against.

He can't stand for it to end and he can't stand for it to continue.

But then the war begins and slavery is changing, he can feel it, he knows and it is painful. It is sickening, it is rebirth into something new but he cannot know whether the new thing will be worse or better, all he knows is thatthe internal conflict has quite literally torn him apart and now he must decide whether he can be put together again and whether he wants to.

All America wants is to say he is free and know that he is telling the truth and then he is dragged back into one whole but the pieces have changed, it fits, barely, and it is new, fragile and not what he had imagined freedom to be. America is overwhelmed with fear and awe, relief and anger but mostly a joy so intense he's honestly a little hysterical. In the moment he's so happy he pretends he can't feel the whisper of rope around his neck. He tells himself that now he is free and he likes to imagine that it sounds like the truth.

* * *

For all yall unfamiliar with the transatlantic slave trade everything in this fic did happen although this is a highly sanitized, really vague version, the reality was not rated t. I won't go into specifics but human experimentation, torture, rape, kidnapping and obviously forced servitude were staples of american slavery. Slavery also made America super rich really fast which gave us a huge boost on the world stage which a lot of assholes will try and use to justify it (why I have no clue, no one is asking for it to be justified). Sadly when slavery ended things did not get magically better for black people. There is actually no official count of how many lynchings occurred after the end of slavery that I could find, the only reason for this I did find was that they occurred so often and whites cared so little that nobody bothered to count so that is the noose America still feels around his neck. It was a hugely tragic yet significant part of american history but I couldn't find many fics about it on this site so I thought I might add one in the hopes that other better authors might be like "I could do a way better job" and then someone would give it the attention it deserves.

Anyway, you know the drill peeps, R and R please!

\- Thayet


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